How The Playbook Uses Behavioral Science To Help Sports Brands Connect With People

For the last hundred or so years, marketing has been a relatively simple challenge of making the consumer aware of your brand, product or service, explaining the benefits and convincing them to buy.

However, the discipline is now undergoing some fundamental changes, brought about partly as a result of the digital media revolution, but also due to a shift in mindset and behavior amongst consumers, who now expect much more from brands.

One important trend is that consumers, especially “millennials”, prefer to invest in new experiences instead of products. A study by San Francisco State University found that people who spent money on experiences rather than material items were happier and felt the money was better spent. From 1987 onwards spending on live experiences and events relative to total spend has increased by 70% in America.

Media Coverage – All image rights belong to Liverpool Football Club

“A lot of people believe that we’ve hit ‘peak stuff’. It’s the idea that people are not as interested as they used to be in buying new products, preferring to invest in new life experiences, often linked to sports, health and wellbeing,” said Eddie May, Managing Director at The Playbook, an integrated communications agency that works with sports, health and technology brands including the NFL, the England & Wales Cricket Board and Pitchero.

In tandem with this shift to experiences over products, many people now also expect brands to contribute to their lives in more meaningful ways, with one survey finding that three quarters of people felt this way. As May explains, “If brands want to win attention, custom and loyalty from people, they have to align themselves with causes that mean something to them. Sports brands are in a great position to do this, because people already inherently care about what they do.”

To help brands navigate these shifts in consumer attitudes, behavioral science is increasingly being used as the foundation for marketing campaigns, with The Playbook being one agency at the forefront of this movement. The agency recently created the Change Network – a group of specialist advisors with expertise in behavioral science and behavior change campaigns. One of the experts in this group is Dr. Rosie Webster, a Behavior Change Consultant.

Webster explains: “Many marketing campaigns base effectiveness on reach and response. However, behavioral science applies the scientific method to understanding and modifying behavior. It provides us with structure and rigor, all based on evidence and theory. By combining marketing with behavioral science, this assists in making campaigns more rigorous, evidence based and measurable. Ultimately this means we can help to ensure they’re actually effective in reaching a brand’s aims.”

The Playbook’s most recent campaign, with Standard Chartered, is an example of behavioral insights being used as the foundation for a creative campaign that engaged people around a charitable cause.

The agency was given a brief to utilize Standard Chartered’s partnership with Liverpool FC, to persuade football fans to engage with Standard Chartered’s “Seeing Is Believing” program, aimed at eradicating avoidable blindness across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The critical insight generated by The Playbook was that in order to persuade people to support the cause, they need to feel real empathy with it. And in order to feel empathy, they need to experience what it might be like to be affected by blindness or visual impairment.

Based on this, The Playbook created a range of disruptive content and imagery to give fans a taste of what life might be like with impaired vision. Content included an emotive video that featured Liverpool FC Manager, Jurgen Klopp, along with blurred out player imagery and other content used across the media and digital channels.

The campaign covered multiple fan touch points: PR in national media, content on Liverpool FC’s digital channels, social influencers, pitch-side advertising and the match-day program. All of it drove the same message about imagining life without clear vision, along with a call to action to visit the campaign website. For the Liverpool FC vs. Manchester United fixture, Standard Chartered gave up its regular shirt sponsorship, replacing it with the Seeing is Believing logo, exposing a global audience of millions to the cause.

The campaign generated over 80 pieces of international media coverage, and the social content was shared over 18,000 times, reaching 41 million people and helping to raise over $150,000 for the cause. The campaign was also noticed by the industry and won the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) award for the Best Corporate Social Responsibility Campaign.

However, for Kutner, despite the campaign exceeding Standard Chartered’s expectations, a real personal highlight came after it ended.

“A five year old Liverpool fan had seen the campaign and wanted to help. He collected pairs of spectacles from his family to donate to people in developing countries. We were so impressed with his efforts and managed to arrange for him to meet Jurgen Klopp as a way of saying thank you. For a five year old to do that shows just how well the campaign connected with people.”

As consumers increasingly demand more from brands in sport and elsewhere, this combination of consumer insight, behavioral science and creating meaningful connections looks likely to be what will help set successful brands apart from the rest.

As Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks team owner, sees it: “We in the sports business don’t sell the game, we sell unique, emotional experiences. We are not in the business of selling basketball.”

“We are in the business of selling fun.”

The Playbook is a communications agency based in London, specializing in helping brands in sport, health and technology to connect more deeply with their audience. We call it ‘smart thinking that moves people’. For more information, email [email protected], contact us on Twitter or visit our website.